


Living Proof

by QuietThing



Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-14
Updated: 2015-06-14
Packaged: 2018-04-04 09:43:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,653
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4132804
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QuietThing/pseuds/QuietThing
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the near future, Professor Emil Hollis has perfected the science of prolonging human life. Humans can now live as long as two centuries with little medical complication. As the decorated head of Life Elongation Technologies (LET) inc., he has only one problem - an unknown illness has caused his daughter Laura to resist the elongation treatment. Does Carmilla, unceremoniously captured for his lab to examine her more 'traditional' method of sustained existence, hold the key to preserving Laura's life? And, more importantly, will Laura agree to it? Featuring Lab Assistant Lafontaine, long-suffering PA Lola Perry and Vampire Wranglers Danny Lawrence and Wilson Kirsch (and eventual Hollstein of course)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Living Proof

Data streams in strange, plasmic swarms, swelling and shrinking as 8s change to 9s, to 0s, to 1s. Laura hates seeing her vitals displayed like that. It makes her feel like the numbers are crawling all over and inside her, like insects. The stark whiteness of the lab seems to buzz as she peers through it to locate a figure hunched at one of the desks on the far side, his head, bald save for a curiously untameable fuzz of white hair at the very crown, glowing faintly with the reflection from one of the screens. 

Laura pads over to him carrying a tray set with coffee and a slice of freshly baked lemon cake. She disturbs a stack of self-important looking papers and half-filled forms on her way past that flap angrily at her intrusion, but the man at the desk remains still.

Laura sets the tray down carefully, dulling the hollow knock of the wood against the surface of the desk. 'Dad,' she says softly. 'Dad.' No response. 'Daddy,' she shakes his shoulder gently. 

'I wouldn't bother,' says a voice and Laura jumps at the sound, 'I dropped two beakers of contaminated interstitial fluid right next to him a few minutes ago and he didn't even stir'. 

Laura's lips scrunch up slightly, 'He's working too hard,' she sighs. 

'Lot's of work to be done,' Lafontaine reminds her, good-humouredly, walking over to her and hopping up to sit on a nearby desk, swinging their legs, the rubber heels of their shoes beating a syncopated rhythm on the table leg. 

'What are you still doing here anyway?' Laura asks the lab assistant, pulling up a wheelie office chair beside her sleeping father and flopping down into it. 

Lafontaine smiles a conspiratorial smile of barely contained excitement. 'Waiting for the arrival of the new specimen.'

'Oh god,' Laura says, knowing Lafontaine well enough to know that anything that could inspire that particular expression would have to teeter on the absolute perimeter of the realm of epistemological science. 'Perry told me to tell you that there's no more room left in the specimen hall, and she not dusting another jar until you find a new place to do your pickling,' she shudders briefly at the memory of her first, and only, visit to her father and Lafontaine's chamber of preserved 'curiosities' - what felt like a thousand species suspended in greenish formaldehyde, faces pressed up against the glass, eyes mostly disintegrated, their tragic, contorted shapes oddly magnified in the curves of the glass jars like a terrible fairground hall of mirrors. 

'Relax, it's a live one this time,' Lafontaine reveals.

'Why doesn't that make me feel better?' Laura asks, and receives nothing more than a distracted chuckle from the lab assistant, who keeps glancing back over their shoulder to check on the door of the lab. 

'Seriously should I be wearing a hazmat suit?' Laura asks dryly, her stomach sinking when Lafontaine looks like they might actually be considering the possibility. 

A violent eruption of noise from directly outside the door disrupts the discussion - the slapping of shoes running down a corridor, orders barked back-and-forth, some sort of muffled protesting, all crescendo-ing towards them to finish in a flourish of fierce fist-banging against the glass aperture of the door, through which Laura can make out the faces of three people, two flushed pink with exertion, another strangely less so. 

'Amazing, they're here,' Lafontaine says, rushing to the door, knocking over a tray of precariously balanced dissection implements in their excitement, causing the cacophony of clattering that finally wakes Laura's father. 

'What?' he asks, his head lifting from the desk in a violent jerk and swivelling it quickly from side to side in an immediate assessment of his surroundings. 

'Vamp's here Prof!' Lafontaine calls over their shoulder, slipping a keycard through the slot beside the door to allow in the new arrivals.

Laura frowns. 'Did they just say 'vamp'?' she asks her father, who stares at her with mild bewilderment as he pats the top of his head in search of his glasses.

Laura swipes them from the desk and hands them to him. 'Vamp?' she insists.

'Vamp?' he repeats, settling his glasses over his nose thoughtfully before his eyes widen and he stands up with an abruptness that makes Laura roll back slightly on her chair. '... Pire!' he exclaims. 'Oh splendid she's here.' 

Laura looks back over to the door as three figures spill into the room, jostling for position through the narrow opening. A tall, athletic-looking boy and girl seem to be wrestling with a struggling third figure, a girl, who is pressed upon from both sides by the others in a severe and forceful embrace, and despite being both gagged and tied, she still seems to be on the verge of bursting loose. 

'A little help here Laf?' asks the girl, red-haired and statuesque, the physical strain of the operation evident in her voice. 

'Right,' Lafontaine dives into the tackle, grabbing at the girl's midsection and helping the other two guide her further into the room. The girl resists the movement, legs alternating between kicking out and stiffening completely in what, Laura notes with a hint of satisfaction, seems a fairly effective manner of ensuring the other three make as little progress as possible. 

'What the hell is going on?' Laura demands. 'What on earth are you doing to that poor girl?'

The boy huffs out a laugh as best he can, 'This ain't no 'poor girl' hottie,' he assures her as Lafontaine shuffles backwards, guiding them all to the open door of a some sort of animal cage against the left-hand wall (Laura knows she should’ve suspected something was up when she saw Lafontaine swinging a baseball bat at said cage earlier in the week, a discarded pile of crumpled cages that had received the same treatment in a sorry heap behind them). The huddled group sways towards it unsteadily, a mass of struggling limbs outstretching and recoiling like some terrible squid, until eventually the girl is pushed forcefully into the cage and there's a flurry of urgent door slamming and key-jangling until the remaining three spring away as the girl rushes up to the bars hitting them with a metallic clang that resonates throughout the whole lab. 

The three breathe heavily for a few prolonged seconds until the boy unleashes a terrible, lupine howl of victory and offers up both palms up into the air for his accomplices to slap. Only Lafontaine takes him up.

'Does someone mind telling me why I just witnessed a young woman being goosenecked into an animal pen?' Laura asks, standing up and rushing over to the cage.

'Don't get too close!' warns the red-haired girl, stepping in front of Laura to cut off her path, 'we caught her mid-hunt ... she'll be,' she pauses, 'well, she'll be hungry.'

The detainee grumbles something harshly in her throat and Laura breaks eye contact with her sincere-seeming captor to look back sympathetically through the bars of the cage. 'At least take that - is that duct-tape? - off her mouth. It barely looks like she can breathe.'

'Oh goodness she doesn’t need to breathe,' he Father pipes up finally, snaking a reassuring arm around his daughter's shoulder. 'Wilson, Danielle,' he addresses the two captors, 'thank you so much for you assistance. And for finding such...' he squints through the bars, 'an intact specimen. In these times they must be quite difficult to find.'

The boy interrupts the girl's polite 'Please Professor Hollis, call me Danny' to exclaim 'You're telling me! The only other one we saw was just a bag of bones, could barely sit itself upright let alone run. This one though,' he nods at the cage, 'she's something else.'

'I'm so confused right now,' Laura admits to Lafontaine, who looks like they're barely restraining themselves from dashing right up to the cage as well, but for different reasons. 

'She's a vampire,' Danny tells Laura, finally, when no one else seems to be offering up the explanation. 'You know, drinks blood, hates garlic, works as poorly disguised metaphor for the decay of the aristocratic classes in nineteenth century Europe?'

Another grumble emanates from the cage.

'A vampire?' Laura repeats, momentarily stunned. 'But they've been extinct since ...'

'2015?' Lafontaine supplies with a grin. 'All a government conspiracy my friend.'

Laura raises a sceptical eyebrow.

'Oh come on, it makes perfect sense. You’re telling me you’ve never had the slightest suspicion of a politician being a legitimate sadistic, blood-sucking fiend?'

‘That’s just rumour and conjecture started by the werewolves,’ Danny says, folding her arms. 

Laura turns to look at her, puzzled further by the revelation.

‘What?’ Danny asks, ‘everyone know werewolves believe in social ownership.’

Laura’s father claps his hands together to end the discussion. ‘Thank you, Lafontaine, Danielle, for that brief and mostly unsubstantiated reinterpretation of history. For now I'm sure we're all very tired and that our new guest would appreciate being left alone to ... adjust.'

A bad-tempered kick is administered to the bars of the cage. 

'Lafontaine, please do the honours,' he retrieves a bag of deep crimson liquid from his lab coat pocket and tosses it towards the lab assistant who catches it deftly and beams 'Gladly,' before he ushers everyone else out of the lab. 

. . . . .

Laura's heart beats quick as she paces briskly towards the door of the lab, checking over each shoulder before swiping herself in, cursing at the loudness of the swoosh the door makes as it retracts sideways into its casement, urging it to 'shhhhhh' as it closes behind her just as loudly. 

She flicks the lightswitch beside the door and the lights flicker on in batches, illumination spreading outwards across the lab from the door to the far wall. The girl, who has backed herself into the corner of the cage to sit with her with her knees pulled up, lifts her head at the intrusion. She tilts her head to the side in a motion that conveys mild interest, her eyes tracking Laura's progress through the room until she stops directly in front of the cage, and crouches. 

Laura pauses, unsure of what exactly to do now she's here, but restless and unable to sleep she knew she couldn't leave this ... girl ... vampire ... whatever she was, tied up and alone in a cage while she lay tucked up in a nice warm bed. 'I ... um ... I'm Laura,' she says. The girl stares back at her, unblinking, deep brown eyes tracking every trace of movement in Laura's face. 

'Look I'm sorry about ... all this. I mean, are you really a vampire? Because ... I majored in journalism with a specific emphasis on government obfuscation of supernatural events and I really really feel like I would've come across something like this. I mean, Okay so there was that incident when the Ambassador of Bulgaria died of blood loss through a puncture wound in his neck on a diplomatic visit to Bucharest ... and I guess you could class that time that Congress was dissolved due to the speaker of the house disintegrating in his chair after a particularly misfortunate incident with a pencil as somewhat suspicious but ...' she pauses for a breath, 'an entire global conspiracy to cover-up the existence of vampires ... if anything just the competence required for scope of an operation like that makes it pretty unlikely don't you think?'

The girl stares back. 

'Oh right, you can't answer. Sorry,' Laura shakes her head at her own insensitivity. 'Look, if you come closer I'll take the tape off your mouth.'

The girl raises an eyebrow at her. A perfectly sculpted eyebrow, Laura notices. And, actually, now she looks at her properly, Laura suspects that the girl is quite astonishingly beautiful, and finds herself almost eager see the complete picture of her face without the ugly stripe of silver tape across the mouth and jaw. 

'Come on,' Laura encourages, 'I don't know how long I have until someone finds me here, Perry has a seriously executive security system covering the laboratories ever since she found Lafontaine was keeping a baby alligator in one of the aquarium tanks, so it's only a matter of time before someone notices.'

The girl makes a motion to move, but hesitates. 

'Do you want to be stuck like that all night?' Laura asks her, and it works as the final encouragement the girl seems to need as she shuffles herself forwards onto her knees so she can scoot up to the bars that Laura's fingers are curled around. Face to face like this, Laura hopes she doesn’t imagine the unspoken agreement of trust that flickers momentarily in the girls eyes. 

Tentatively, Laura reaches forwards, slipping her small hands through the narrow bars of the cage. The girl watches, and Laura can feel the whoomphing of the blood as it rushes in the channels of her own ears as her heart rate increases exponentially with every inch of progress her fingers make towards the girl’s face. 

Finding the edge of her tape, she picks briefly with a blunt fingernail and loosens it enough to pull.

She counts to three in her head, then rips it off.

The girl pulls back as the tape peels off her mouth with a soft sticking sound. She scrunches and unscrunches her lips and nose a few times and shakes her head before she speaks for the first time. 

'You talk too much,' she says.

It's not exactly the gushing gratitude Laura was expecting, and she frowns. 'A thank you would be nice,' she reminds her, balling the tape up in her fist and tossing it away behind her.

'Oh gee, thanks for having me tackled, tied-up and gagged by two orang-utans in sportswear and dumped in a cage to be spoon-fed pig’s blood by a jabbering labcoat.'

'Hey!' Laura huffs indignantly, 'I had no idea what was going on! I had nothing to do with any of this!'

The girl gives her a frustrated look of confliction, conveying that she’s aware of Laura’s ignorance, but has nowhere else to direct her anger, so she just heaves an exasperated sigh and says, 'Can you please take that infernal bunting down, it's giving me a terrible headache.’ She flicks her head up and Laura, following her gaze, notices the string of garlic bulbs hanging across the bars like flaky, vegetative Christmas lights. 

'Ummm ... right, yeah. Of course,' she stands up and reaches, but, hindered by her short stature, has to go and find a stool to stand on to complete the task. She feels the girl's eyes upon her the whole time, highly conscious of the way her pyjama top is riding up as she reaches to expose her stomach, and, now she thinks about it, equally highly conscious of the fact that her pyjamas are covered in bunnies. 

She steps down from the stool and places the offensive decorations on a nearby work surface before returning to the cage. 'I'll ... I'll take them out with me when I go,' she reassures the girl.

'Thanks,' she mutters. 

'What's your name?' Laura asks, really observing the girl for the first time. She is beautiful, as Laura had suspected, long dark hair framing her pale face in effortless soft curls, eyes deep brown, features slender and angular and perfectly proportioned, her deep red lips, now revealed, tugging into a charismatic smirk as the girl notices Laura staring. 

‘Carmilla,’ she answers. 

‘OK, Carmilla,’ Laura fixes her with the most sincere of stares, leaning up close to the cage, making sure she has Carmilla at her exact eye-level, ‘are you a vampire?’

Carmilla chuckles softly, tilts her head to the side again like she had when Laura had first entered room, bites at the soft, plump flesh of her bottom lip, dragging a corner of it into her mouth with a curiously pointed canine tooth, then answers, ‘Yes, cutie. I’m a vampire.’


End file.
